There goes the Neighbourhood

There Goes The Neighbourhood is an exhibition and book about the contested inner city suburb of Redfern which runs is produced and presented by Performance Space at CarriageWorks from 23 May 2009 until 27 June from 12PM - 6PM (TUE - SAT) says the media release from Performance Space.

As Geoff Turnbull, in his article for the book explains, “Redfern is famous”, the one area in Sydney that people around the world know and talk about. This fame, or infamy, springs from many sources – Redfern is considered the site of the first urban land rights claim in the ‘70s, it grabbed headlines during the 2005 riots against the death of an Aboriginal boy after a police chase, it is a gathering ground for Indigenous people when they come through Sydney, it is the only suburb of Australia with a minister specifically appointed to oversee its development and it is a place of struggle and a gentrifying area on the door step of the city.

Redfern has also been a source of inspiration for generations of artists – both Indigenous and non-Indigenous – who have been drawn to the complex fabric of its urban life. Prominent Indigenous conceptual artist Brenda L Croft made a series of portraits of Redfern’s local inhabitants Conference Call for the 1992 Sydney Biennale (in collaboration with the US artist Adrian Piper). These works have subsequently been exhibited all over the world. For this exhibition viewers will have the rare opportunity to see them in their original location of Redfern, providing an occasion to perceive and reflect on all the tiny changes that have taken place in the area over the last decade (such as the disappearing icon of the TNT towers).

It is this process of urban change that has been the focus of an ongoing work by a local Sydney art collective SquatSpace who have conducted Tour of Beauty, a bike and bus tour of Redfern since 2005. SquatSpace will run a tour as part of the exhibition, inviting people to travel around the suburb and learn from locals how changes in the area affect their lives. The tour has been an enormously popular art event in Sydney and has run over 15 times since its first inception in 2005.

Micheal Rakowitz, a famous American artist, was invited to participate in the 2008 Sydney Biennale. For this event, he also chose Redfern as the subject of his work, building a giant replica of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International at the Art Gallery of NSW with building materials salvaged from a house being demolished in Redfern. The drawings that accompanied this work will be included in the exhibition and provide an intuitive history of the area - showing for the first time in Redfern itself.

The curators of the exhibition Keg de Souza and Zanny Begg conducted a month long Performance Space residency at the Redfern Community Centre in November 2008 in preparation for the exhibition. From this residency they have produced an interactive boxing game, the Pemulwuy Dream Team – shot in the Redfern Gym – where viewers can choose various locals from The Block, step into their shoes and fight for issues they feel are important for the future of Redfern. The outcome of the game in unpredictable – the locals win some, and lose some fights – highlighting the unpredictable nature of urban change itself. Characters in the game range from two eleven year old twins who are fighting drug dealers in the area to a 45 year old sound engineer for the Redfern Community Centre who is fighting the Redfern Waterloo Authority.

An art collective from Chicago, Temporary Services, will by flying to Sydney to make a work specifically about Redfern. They will be conducting a public opinion poll on a public sculpture at the top of Cope Street to address issues of urban change and democracy.

This work will challenge how public art is often used as part of the gentrification process.

In addition to these Redfern-specific works there will be a range of other works developed by international artists that consider urban change more broadly.

Democracia, an art collective from Madrid, will exhibit a work recently exhibited at the Taipei Biennale, and shown for the first time in Australia. The work is about the smashing of El Salobral, the largest shanty town in Europe. High energy music accompanies video of bulldozers as they smash apart the homes of the transient squatter community - the destructive/seductive appeal of the event is undercut by how the artists twist it into an uncomfortable spectacle.

Jakob Jakobsen, an urban activist from Denmark will be coming to Sydney with a series of TV works about the dramatic closure of a culture centre, the Youth House, in Copenhagen which sparked several days of riots and led to over 1000 arrests. Jakobsen participates in an artist run TV station which documents the urban landscape, and is an international expert on Situationist and Post-Situationist practices.

Also for the first time in Australia will be a re-enactment of the seminal 1963 work by Allan Kaprow Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hoffman. Allan Kaprow coined the term “happening” and is considered the father of conceptual and installation art. In this work he installed a room full of junk which people were invited to enter and play with. As furniture is moved around the room people are forced to enter into a series of spatial negotiations – a metaphor the curators of the exhibition hope to extend to issues of urban change more broadly.

The exhibition will also be accompanied by the launch of a new book There Goes The Neighbourhood: Redfern and the Politics of Urban Space. The book has articles by some of the best-known theorists of urban change such as Mike Davis and Brian Holmes and has contributions from key writers about Redfern such as Gary Foley, Elizabeth Farrelly and Geoff Turnbull.